The Most Unwanted, Boring PC: Dell OptiPlex GX270
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- For some reason I bought this cheap OptiPlex from 2004. So let's take a look at it! From my view, it's easily one of the most undesirable computer systems ever. Boring looks, basic business hardware, bad airflow, and suffering from capacitor plague. Does it even still work? Let's find out!
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● All background music licensed from:
www.epidemicsound.com
00:00 The most boring unwanted PC
02:04 This is why it's bad
06:04 Ports and things
07:16 Inside the clamshell case
09:17 Does it even power on?
12:11 Replacing battery, thermal paste
13:58 Installing Windows 98 SE
16:50 SimCity 3000 Unlimited
18:50 Unreal Tournament GOTY
20:50 GTA Vice City
23:34 Epic Pinball Sound Blaster test
26:02 I can't hate it? Yes it's bad, but...
#LGR #Retro #computer - Наука та технологія
This is the epitome of a "school computer" to me. These were EVERYWHERE when I was in high school.
YES THEY WERE IN MY MIDDLE SCHOOLS AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN THE 2000s
Good memories
Yep. These were all the computers at my highschool. My middle school however had those colorful iMacs.
My school used these until 2020
I remember seeing these here in Barcelona still running Windows 2000. In 2012!
I remember these...At one point we had a major court case with over 1 million *documents*. Not pages, but 1 million DOCUMENTS. There was no way we'd ever be able to get through them by manually reviewing them. So, everything was put on forklift pallets, stuffed into shipping containers, and sent to India for scanning. The resulting images were sent back stateside, where I set up a ghetto-fabulous OCR cluster of 50 used Dell GX270s. They were running 24/7. I think we were paying about $20 a piece for them at the time. It worked fine for awhile, then the capacitors started smoking. At $20 a whack, we just kept buying more and it was routine to swap a machine out. I forget how many systems we went through but it was a high number. The end product was amazing. The docs were fully OCR'd, indexed, with a custom search engine. Saved the client an absolute fortune and delivered in record time.
Good times.
Absolutely incredible story. What software did you use to network the machines? Slurm or something?
What the fuck was the court case?
Bankruptcy case out of the Southern District of New York. The 1031 Tax Group and Ed Okun.
Software was Abbyy. All very basic stuff. I refer to myself as "the world's worst IT guy". Whatever is cheap, simple, and easy is how I roll.
@@grayrabbit2211oh shit....Im the same...fuck it, if it works it ain't shit
@@foxxy46213 you'll laugh : I just retired our PBX last year. Running on a Dell Power Edge 2650. Built in 2003. Almost 20 years old, including the drives.
1:15 Just buzzed enough to buy it. That is so funny. Years ago I was drinking one night and got drunk and ended up ordering a video card online. Woke up the next day with no memory of doing it. Got an e-mail from Amazon about the purchase and went, what the eff? I was pleasantly surprised that I ordered the right one for my computer and it ended up serving me well for the next few years!
Ha! Sometimes drunk you is lookin' out for sober you.
Other times you end up with a Dell with leaky caps, but hey 🍻
J@@LGR
Your channel feels like a lazy summer afternoon in a cozy home as a child. Keep up the great work
I think you just summed up why this channel is my comfort blanket in a single sentence. Spot on.
This channel was my lazy summer afternoons when I was in junior high, along with LTT. That was in 2017-2019.
I love the blur over the thermal paste to avoid comments about how you apply it. 🤣
here's what i was looking for, im glad i guessed right
Was wondering if that's why.
Yeah, there are a lot of PC elitists out there that think they know every thing and anything about building a PC. Their way of putting thermal paste is the god gospel and ever other method is dumb and makes the person doing it that way inferior to them in their own minds. They are the ones that post “your system sucks and mine doesn’t” replies to technical questions on Reddit. That is because they don’t know how to troubleshoot technical issues, only how to RMA hardware they think are broken but probably its user error. 😂
I never understood why it was such a hot-button topic. It's not difficult, and it's been proven time and time again that as long as you have enough, it doesn't really matter how you do it.
I thought it was censored cos you lot get off on thermal paste or something lol
I used to work for an office moving company in the late 2000's, and I can't tell you how many hundreds of these things I pulled out of spare offices and stacked onto pallets to be sent off to tech recycling. If I can give them any sort of praise, it's that they at least stack very solidly and squarely.
😂
These days if I need a desktop PC, I just get a used OptiPlex. My current one is a 2015, 7040 pizza box-type thing. I think it was about US$50 if my conversion is right. 110% beyond adequate for mostly everything bar gaming.
@@MattExzy the optiplexes are my fav oem pc, they always ran super well and are uselly easy to replace and add stuff in
@@MattExzy I use off lease HP SFF computers. My current one is from about 2014 with an i3-4160 CPU and 16GB of RAM (it came with four so I replaced the RAM). I have been using them for years, I had one HP with the hyperthreaded Pentium CPUs that had to be sent back and replaced but otherwise they last for years even after their original owners are through with them. I am not a gamer so that isn't a consideration.
I think I found one of these dumped in the woods. Brought it home and cleaned it up.
Straightened up the chassis and uphraded it to the max with a P4 3.4HT and 4 gigs of ram.
nVidia 5950 and SB Live. Ran that thing as a Delta Force Land Warrior server for about 6 years.
Oh the nostalgia!
The answer… is yes!
You should have left it to it's natural habitat.
An invasive species!
I am 99% sure this Optiplex model is what was under my desk at my first post-graduate job in IT. A couple decades later I'm back in higher education IT and have an all-new uninteresting Optiplex 5000 under my desk. How times haven't changed!
Thank you for a fabulous nostalgia hit, Clint!
It's probably still under that same desk while some other poor soul slaves away at it. LOL!
I resent this title. Still got mine in the attic with probably the 5th ATI GPU I put in it. I will never forget mine or how it started me on my PC customization journey.
I can't believe that those machines in the early 2000s, like the Dell dimension 2400 and 3000, had 2 disc drives, a DVD and CD ROM that were separate
@@alancenne9537 And now you can't find a midtower case with a single optical drive bay... There's good reason I'm using a 15 year old Cooler Master case for my main workstation.
for me yes
Mine would creak like crazy. So much cheap, old plastic, and that USB in the front hatch is SO nostalgic, haha
Whoa, fancy meeting you here!
Love your animations, man.
I made a lot of early videos on this PC. Maybe until 2010 honestly, haha. This wasn't my main PC, but the UA-cam PC.
@@MlCHAELHlCKOXFilmsah hell yeah man, do you still have it or was it recycled years ago?
worlds collide
to me USB is still a new technology! it sounds weird to me to call USB ports nostalgic haha
I'm legit surprised one of these survives. I worked for Dell doing phone support in 2006-2008 and these things were probably 10-20% of all the calls I had for one simple reason: they are the final boss of the Capacitor Plague!
On another note, before we could dispatch a replacement motherboard, we had to have the customer verify that the caps were bad. Someone was talking to a small doctor's office and they said it took three different doctors to figure out how to open it. That was when I first learned just because you're smart, doesn't mean you're smart at everything.
You missed the fun of being there when Dell knew they had a problem but were publicly denying it.
@MrSnivvel Oh, we never heard it from the horses mouth but everytime we opened DellServ, we got the popup saying there's an extended warranty for the capacitor problem. But of course, these things "just happen" sometimes.
My 260 is still going need to convert it to a Linux box.
I had to replace all the caps on my 260.
@@BurritoVampire almost every one of those dells of that era i have come across were always full of bad caps
We had a family PC with the same exact model as this, it has Windows XP installed until we decided to migrate to Windows 7. It was me and my older brother who was assigned to take care of the family PC. I remember I used it a lot to type the papers I needed for college. I even installed a "USB internet stick" so we can browse the web without having to rent a computer in our nearest computer rental shops. It got broken when my older brother decided to use it for gaming. He would play for hours never letting us use the PC. I was mad when it got broken, and more furious when he decided to sell it unbeknownst to us, he used the money to buy himself a new phone and spend it all on booze. This was a great PC back in the day, too bad ours got broken so soon.
USB Wi-Fi adaptors!!!
Long story short: I had a 'DGT' (system integrator) desktop PC given to me by a cousin and used a TP-Link WN727N to get online (on Windows XP with 512 MB of RAM) as my dad was renting a room in someone else's flat at the time (2009-2011) and running a long network cable to the PC from their WRT54G in their loungeroom wasn't going to be an option for us.
It's funny cause your bro looked at the family information hub and decided selling it for beer money was the right choice
@@Marco-wp9kw yeah wish I could say the same for you, cause clearly your mother didn't made the right choice in having you as her child. I mean ab0rti0n would've been the right choice for eh?
@@Marco-wp9kw yeah wish I could say the same for you, clearly your mother didn't made the right choice in having you as her child eh? 🤡
@@Marco-wp9kw welp OP can't say the same thing about you, clearly it looks like your mother didn't made the right choice in having you as her child now eh? 🤡
Thanks for helping me unlock core memories of fixing hundreds of these when working for a university back in the day. Not only did these have capacitor plague, but the typical 17" dell monitors that usually came with these in a package deal also had the same cap issues. The only praise I can give these is me being one of the few able to fix them, making me a rockstar in management's eyes and helped jumpstart my career with job hookups and glowing recommendations.
Oh my god that’s my actual childhood computer. I haven’t seen it in so long. Lasted up until about 2014. Thanks for this one LGR.
We had these in middle school and some kids realized that the not only could the Dell logo on the front rotate if you had the tower horizontal or vertical, but you could pop the emblem off and steal it for no reason.
OMG thanks for unlocking that memory. I remember nearly all of them were stolen in my school.
They were all stolen from our middle and high school too. I took one for myself towards the end of my 8th grade year. I still have it somewhere
I have one sitting on the floor of my bedroom for years, now I know why there's no Dell logo. The computer used to belong to someone else.
Fun fact: In the early 2000s Pepsi gave tons of these to universities in exchange for signing a contract that they wouldn't sell anything but Pepsi products on campus for a set number of years. Our small junior college had TONS of them. They ran WinXP very well, and in-between lessons we'd load them up with abandonware and play during breaks since they had Deep Freeze on them and would revert back to a set hard drive image after every reboot.
My high school office and business course classroom had the flat-form Optiplex model PC's. They were set up to the school's mainframe and were programmed to reset and memory wipe the OS every night. Well, the kids in my class somehow found out how to hack into the school's mainframe directory where the reinstall files were stored. This directory was not flagged to memory wipe and remained intact. Well, these kids they put in that folder the free demo of Halo 1 which networked the EXE to every PC on that server, and because the business teacher was kind of scatterbrained and took him awhile to get the class set up, the class would play the game the entire time he was preparing the lesson plan.
Lmaoo
this was my first PC. met my lifelong online friends on here, and met my wife on an old BBS forum in 2004 on this machine. It ran call of duty and that's what I needed. It had room for a graphics card and that's all I needed. Replaced it in 2009 with my custom rig that lasted me until 2023.
BBS was still a thing in 2004? I started using the internet in 08ish and even then they seemed like something from a forgotten era.
@@tomr9663They're still around now I thought?
Nice my guy! My 2009 custom rig (i7 920, gtx 275) also lasted me until 2023, when i built a new one :) Here's to the 2009-2023 custom rig crew!
You selling parts buddy?
I worked with my dad in his computer shop back in 2007-09. We had a steady stream of them come in with leaking capacitors, so we switched customers over to refurbished commercial HP 'pizza box' workstations that seldom came back for warranty work. Part of our pitch to sell the HPs was to invite the customer to pick up their Dell and notice how the plastic case flexes, then let them feel the solidness of the HP. Worked every time... unless they wanted a laptop, of course.
I was a student worker at my college during this time and yes I was going to comment on the leaky capacitor issue. In our case Dell sent us 210 motherboards to simply replace the ones that burned out during this time. We replaced a whole campus' worth of MB that summer.
Yup! The GX270, GX280, and GX520.. soooooooo many replaced motherboards..
@@Andrew_G4CH were the initial Dell BTX boards bad too then? I recall those being infinitely more solid than their predecessor
Yes, I’ve see too many leaky caps in those… to the landfill!!
Why not just replace the bad caps with some higher quality ones? Most of these models even had the motherboards on trays so it was always really easy to pull them out, take out the screws securing it to the tray and replace a few caps. It was only ~30min of work when I was doing these regularly, otherwise you are just creating more e-waste for what is otherwise a perfectly acceptable computer.
OMG I'D REMEMBER THAT COMPUTER FOREVER !!!!! my dad worked in the tech department of his job (it was a state government-adjacent job) and around 2006-2007ish he brought home some of these units that had been replaced with newer models to use in the house, one of which he helped me refurbish one of these into my first PC !!! I helped him install more memory and better disc drives and i can't remember what elsewe did in there now as he taught me how to safely work inside a computer !! I miss that machine so much, it was my very first computer that was 100% my own and ran XP (my fav os haha) !!!!! I think my dad is still using one of these for receiving the data from his home weather station (you covered a similar one of those things in an older video I remember, haha). anyways. i WOULD want one of these if only for the nostalgia factor XD
I actually picked up a Dell Dimension 3000 (very similar aesthetics to these OptiPlex PCs) for 25 dollars at a local thrift store- The inside looks practically off-the-shelf new, and was apparently used by an elderly woman as evidence by the like, 4 different antivirus programs it had on it and a few documents that remained on it from not being wiped prior to sale. The capacitors thankfully show zero signs of failure, too. A simple factory reset later, and I have a 2.8 GHZ P4 build which I'll be throwing a 8400 GS PCI (No AGP slots on the original micro ATX, sadly), an extra gig of pc3200, and probably a 3.2ghz P4 once I get everything else together. Always nice to have an older XP build for some retro nostalgia. Great video as always, Clint.
censorship to hide your way to apply the thermal paste and avoid controversy made my day
Was that the reason it was censored? I didnt get it.
@@schinsky6833Everyone has an opinion on how to “properly” apply thermal paste. And some can’t help but share their opinion of how wrong it’s been done.
Fun Story...I was working at a medium side company that did a huge refresh to replace these around 2008-9. We were swapping them out and removed all the hardware and put them on a pallet Saturday...and prepping for deployment of the freshly imaged replacements Sunday. Overnight we got broke into (more than likely someone watching all the activity in the warehouse with the rollup doors open also bad area). Stole ALL the OPtiplex's off the pallets...and didn't realize there were shiny new PC's and Monitors 50 feet away still in the boxes lol. So...no need for disposal. Cherry on top...we already removed the hard drives for destruction as we decommissioned the "OLD" computers. It was a good day
It was your coworker. They knew no-one would care.
I wouldn't even report that to the police unless you could file an insurance claim to recover the value of the stolen property.
Couldn't have been a more perfect outcome. That's awesome! XD
"Thanks for taking my garbage out, guys! Come back and do the dishes if you want!"
I have *so much* nostalgia for this case.
My school had these for every computer back in the day, and I remember spending so much time just playing flash games (and getting very little work done) on these machines.
I actually teared up a bit seeing this again because of how much fun I had back then
My family had one of these second hand when my grandmothers office was getting rid of them. Was the first PC we had in the house. I am grateful for i though. Dont think I would ever have gotten good with computers were it not for it. Much like how nobody ever became a mechanic after getting a brand new mustang for their 16th birthday. Its the people who use something you have to constantly troubleshoot. Thank you Optiplex.
Optiplex PCs are actually sought after in the home arcade community because they make for really easy to get and cheap PCs that are capable of running mame games and a lot of newer arcade stuff that you don't really need a strong PC for like bemani games
My mom had one of these. When it started giving her trouble she called customer support and they did everything they could to deny the warranty claim. When they found out it was kept on a floor instead of on top of a desk they denied the claim stating the floor was "too cold". Yeah, they really told her computers should be kept warm, cold air was bad for them. 🙄 Unfortunately she didn't know any better and certainly wasn't aware of the cap issue.
That chilly floor is probably what did mine in too
No wonder the pins got bent on my optiplex 390!! The cpu wasn't hot enough that pesky fan kept it chillies than Antarctica
@@HypeXesk Maybe they didn't bend, but shriveled. 😅
The colder a PC is kept the better. My PC works better in winter than summer because my room is about 40 degrees colder. What is bad about the floor is the dust intake.
@@MrWolfSnack Oh, we all know that, like I said this was just Dell trying to find an excuse not to fill the warranty claim. My mom is a meticulous cleaner, there was little dust when in it when I took it apart.
Man I love those 2K Dell computers, especially the Optiplex line it brings back so many memories of my High school and many friends that had one of those back in the day
You just unlocked so many memories (and almost none are good). I did IT for a local government office around 2005-ish and had to deal with hundreds of these or similar models due to a contract with Dell. Being in the thick of the capacitor plague without knowing it at the time, I noticed the recurring problem with caps being the point of failure and had to fight tooth and nail to get the higher-ups to believe me when I said I thought all of them would fail eventually. I finally made enough noise for Dell to acknowledge it and replace every computer in the office with newer models, though they never admitted to any wrongdoing and acted like they had no clue about the failing caps prior to me telling them. I never heard about them getting in trouble for it later, so it's nice to finally know something happened.
On an unrelated note; Another common issue was people complaining that their PCs wouldn't boot. 9 out of 10 times all I had to do was go to their desk and hit eject on the floppy drive, yet they never learned. Some departments used digital cameras, and since they refused to upgrade anything they didn't have to, they were Sony Mavicas that used 3.5" floppies for storage (I think you've actually covered the exact model in a past video). I do not miss the days of the A drive being the default boot device.
The college computer store sold these by the truckload. I went through two Optiplexes during my time at the University of New Hampshire (1998-2004), and this exact machine was my last one. Really good discounts, half good machine.
SO MANY Counterstrike/Half Life/Unreal 2000 tournaments were played on that machine...along with Dungeon Keeper 1/2, Mechwarrior 3, World of Warcraft...the internal graphics chip wasn't that bad, but tossing in a TNT changed so much fo rit.
Why mine has become a retro gaming Pc it can play games like that with no issues.
If you ask me, the design of those DELL cases are legendary because they were immortalized in the counterstrike cs_office map as the BEEFY Computers
As soon as I saw this video I was like, oh yea that looks like a computer from de_office in cs source
office players also probably still play on one of these
Brit here - I used to work tech support for the NHS mid/late 2000's, we got so used to swapping out warranty replacement motherboards on capacity faulty dells we could do it on your desk in under 5 minutes, it didn't take long to work out the warranty replacement motherboards were going faulty with the same cap problems resulting in a stern conversation with the dell rep, him paying for an all expenses paid night out and him drinking a flaming cocktail without blowing it out, almost as much hilarity ensued as finding yet another dead motherboard ensuing our continued employment.
Blurring that paste application was priceless!
A GX260 was my first PC I didn't have to share with the rest of the family.
With my first pay check from my first job I maxed it out at 2GB of ram, bought the best CPU it supported, P4 3.06Ghz, the first Intel that featured hyper threading (iirc), and bought a BFG Geforce 6200OC AGP GPU.
Played Fallout 3 at 15 average fps
I had the same setup with a 6200 and also ran fallout 3 but there was some nonsense you could do in the config to get it running mid 20s
My first computer was a gx280 p4 2.8 HT that i put 3gb ram and a Nvidia 8400gs
If only you knew that most of those dell 6200s could have shader an vertex pipeline unlocked to be 6600gts same with 6800gs to ultras
@@foxxy46213If only you knew that I did know about the 6200 pipelines, but unfortunately yy model's weren't unlockable, SMH
my high school computer class was full of these and the whole class had a little lan party basically every day downloading the quake 3 and halo ce demos. the teacher even played with us half the time
Grew up with one of these!! After my parents stopped using it for business it became a backup computer (running XP) and then it became mine. Used to play the Myst games on it for hours!! Never saw a problem with it. Played DVD’s well too. Got rid of it in like 2016 when I got a more practical computer for school.
These sorts of nondescript Dell computers with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 have a special place in my heart as some of my earliest experiences with computers in my elementary school and local library. Learning to type and browse the web, playing online games, looking at the newly digitized library catalog, and looking at neat websites. I quite like these computers.
I ran a school district during that time. One half tech savy principal bought BUNCHES of those. For school surfing and typing, they worked. The principal who bought them had everyone install the McAfee that came with them. We already had Norton on the network so they were working REAL slow right after that. We had to image them to make them right.
Unlucky! My school district had iMac G3s and iBooks that ran well for their time.
@@nonstopmaximum2141 I started working in IT when the school had just purchased 500 optiplex 100's with PIII-500s and 110's with Celerons. Those PIII's came with 64 MB RAM. My students upgraded them all over the space of three years to 768MB max. We also installed PowerLeap PIII 1000 slocket CPUs. They were installed in Fall of 2000 and were still being used in 2011 with XP. Sturdy machines.
I had one of these bad bois in my room all through middle and high school. It ran Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines so slowly, I would exit onto the streets of Santa Monica, go make dinner for 20 minutes, and when I got back it was still loading. But, it played things like Doom and Morrowind okay.
I was so impatient that, by the end of its long life, it had hammer dents in the top of the case from me pounding on it in hope it would run faster. The irresponsible actions of an angry 16 year old.
From 2002-2004 I worked as an IT assistant for my high school, which mostly meant vacuuming out the Dells. Poor airflow & a tendency to inhale particulate matter meant that, even with constant maintenance, our computer lab reeked of plastic & hot dust. I've never encountered so many temperature BIOS alarms before or since.
I can't remember the number of motherboard replacements I asked to DELL support on OptiPlex GX270 and GX280 models during 2008 and 2009.
Even after the warranty had expired our boss ordered us to continue asking DELL because he told us DELL refused to replace all the motherboards before failure and it was a know problem.
It was a big issue at the time and we spent so much time on this (between 2 or 5 PCs died every week during all the time I worked there).
Our fleet was several thousands PCs.
Those defective PCs had intermittent issues and random system failures. Every time there were bumpy or "blooming" capacitors.
DELL could have paid us for all the time we spent troubleshooting theses bad batches of PCs... :)
In my final semesters of high school I got to work with the tech facilitator for the school as a "class." You were given credits if you needed them (I didn't) and you couldn't sign up for it, you could only be recommended or sought out by the facilitator himself. Reimaging machines, chilling in the little server room, going to help people with projectors, fixing broken laptop screens for the mobile carts. These bad boys *infested* schools. That final semester I worked with him we had to mark a *bunch* of them and their corresponding CRTs as surplus and lug them to the dumpster.
Well that was stupid. All you have to do is put them in a Uhaul and go. Imagine being that stupid throwing away computers.
Dumpster 😢
@@MrWolfSnack Sure dude, not like that's a crime or anything.
Also, you apparently didn't pay attention to the video, these models had capacitor issues, not something most people are going to want, or be able to, fix.
#1 It is not a crime. They are marked to be thrown in the dump. It is trash. It is forfeit. It is not illegal to take garbage.
#2 - the capacitor plague did not start until the mid 2010's and the effective rate of it is low and is only affected by installing an extra graphics card.
#3 setting these up and outfitting them as PC's to be sold or given to charities to get people online and experience the internet is a far better use then being a wage slave and obeying "dear leader" and blindly throwing things away for no reason. @@chrisbaker8533
I don't know if Dell got a very cheap manufacturing deal to mass produce these damn PC's but they were EVERYWHERE in people homes and at corporate offices. When I use to work at MCI WorldCom the company were offering these Dells at a discounted price new through Dell. Our IT guy use to tell us when they were tossing these "expired" Dell PC's in the dumpster and that he would leave a few on the shipping dock after he pulled the hard drives.
my buddy bought one of these as his main rig in college back in the early 2000s. I dubbed it "the pizza box" due to how it opened. We were of course big into upgrading with video cards and various other things. My buddy was obsessed with quiet. He ordered a bunch of replacement fans only to find out that almost every. single. connector inside this thing were ALL proprietary and any aftermarket upgrades involved a certain amount of wire "hacking". Needless to say, he built his own machines from the ground up after that.
I remember supporting them around about 2007. I had completely forgotten they existed. Thanks for dragging that memory back up.
My work made the mistake of buying an entire fleet of Dell Optiplex GX270 desktops. They had thousands of them, and yes, every single one of them failed due to bulging/leaking caps. Well before the warranty period expired, we were sending them back to Dell to get replaced. That soon changed to them sending technicians out to replace the motherboards, and eventually they just sent us the replacement boards and we'd swap them out and send back the faulty boards. We'd get them by the box load, once I even swapped out 10 boards in a day. I got so quick at it, I could do a swap in about 2 minutes flat. I know for a fact that they knew there were problems and kept selling those machines anyway, because I personally swapped out the motherboards in several machines multiple times each. And they were still selling them after we'd already had multiple batches fail!
It got so bad that we had to get one of our maintenance technicians to replace the caps in a handful of critical machines that we couldn't afford to have fail. Only then were they actually reliable machines.
Ah... this takes me back. Back to nightmares of replacing dozens of GX280 Motherboards at my office due to exploding caps. Did they learn their lesson? Nope. Many years later, I became an expert in replacing caps on the Dell 19" 4:3 monitors! EDIT: 5:4 monitors
75-80% failure rate. It was nuts.
Found one at a Deseret for $8.
Yeah, blown caps and it has been collecting dust for the last year as I keep putting off fixing it but I have never soldered anything.
I think every one of these we had failed with bad caps.
*5:4
My 280 has somehow survived it but I don’t know it’s past so it could have got it’s mother board replaced at one time.
I recently enabled a GX260 (just as ugly) that no one wanted so I decided to accept it into my home. It didn't start but with just a few adjustments and changing the battery it started working. I installed an equally undesirable FX 5200 pci that I had lying around and it worked well. I needed a Win XP machine for my games from 2000 to 2004, and well, I am very happy with the result, Doom 3 works quite well, very playable and the other games more than good. Excellent video, greetings from Honduras.
Do you have any really old computers lying around like 70s-90s? greetings from El Salvador
I worked for the school systems in my county in the late 2000’s and they had tons of these. The capacitor issue wasn’t the only fatal flaw with these machines. One of the solder joints on the tension rod mount that held the chipset heatsink down was very week, and after a year or two of use the solder joint would break and the chipset heatsink would pop off, causing blue screens from the chipset being too hot. This brings back nightmares of having to solder those things back on, because trust me, I soldered a ton of them. In my opinion, this was probably the absolute worst Dell machine… ever.
I do have to say the GX270 is the reason I got a job at Unisys and worked there for 5 years. First 3 years were just replacing these boards. Literally, there was not a day I didn't. Every single person who bought the 3 year, replace next day plan, got it replaced. Some times more than once! It was seriously bad. Replacing the board is honestly dead easy, just remove the tray, remove the cables and one screw is all it took. There was one customer that forced dell to replaced ALL their computers in their office (About 120?) one night, got some good overtime there. I managed to upgrade myself to servers and the enterprise stuff before the entire office shutdown and got laid off when Dell stopped outsourcing to Unisys around 2011-12. Thanks to that I learned alot about enterprise stuff so I am very thankful.
Funny though. This problem was almost EXCUSIVLY on the GX270. I suspect its because I never ran into any home users that had the same problem because they didn't have the 3 year warranty (Problem started up about the end of the second year on average)
That case just screams "CS 1.5 lan games in between math and social studies".
Round of surf_mario
Pretty much, think every high school had somebody who discovered how to install software onto the school PCs and it'd be UT, CS or Halo CE or something like that. (Was me back when I was there but not sure if anyone else took on that task after I left) I wonder if that's changed or if kids even bother with that anymore.
@@RossMitchellsProfileI was that kid of my Gen in my school. I used RetroArch as the candidate.... damn.
I was an NCR "Customer Engineer" from 2008 to 2012, and I replaced SO many motherboards in these exact machines across the north-west part or Arizona, for exactly the reason you highlighted-- bulging, leaking capacitors. The one you have, and the small-form-factor version. They also had a habit of burning out their weird, proprietary cooling fan/temperature-sensor situation-- replaced a ton of those as well.
Thankfully, it was clear that Dell (or someone) was meticulously re-capping all the affected boards with brand new caps, all marked with Sharpie X's, and they worked at least long enough for me to move on career-wise. What a memory!
Thank you for your service in the New California Republic 🫡
What quality of caps did you use for replacement? Because some of the caps looked still fine, and I would guess that the replaced caps are already leaking after more than 10 years.
@@webfischi Oh I'm sure they were still lowest-bidder replacements-- I only got the refurbished motherboards and didn't do any soldering or anything like that. To be honest, it was a pretty chill gig for a guy who doesn't mind driving around A LOT at all hours of the day and night for the dumbest break/fixes you've ever heard of 🤣
Patrolling the Mojave, almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
At the community college I retired from, I worked in computer services, and we bought hundreds of these boat anchors in 2004 to deploy on campus. Nothing but trouble. Dell had to send out 10 technicians to replace motherboards, that had leaking or exploded capacitors, as we had far too much work to do to repair them (they were under a Dell service contract). We sent them to surplus property in 2007 and were sold as a lot for 750.00. We only purchased Precision Workstations from Dell after that.
Dear LGR. This was the most relaxing video I've seen a while. I totally enjoyed it. I worked with these in the 2007 era. I in fact, took 30 of them and networked them all together into a CONDOR supercomuting cluster!
Our insurance company bought a ton of these right before the market tanked. They all died a couple years later, and the company was just barely limping along, so I had to replace them all with their predecessors, which luckily were still in storage. We stumbled along until the company finally found a favorable space in the market and could finally replace them several years later.
When I moved on to my next employer there was a box in the hallway of the repair shop. When I asked what it was, I was informed that it was a box of GX280 motherboards. Apparently, this new company had so many of them in use and the things failed so frequently that it had reached the point that instead of each failed system having to be reported to Dell, they would simply ship us a box full of motherboards and when those were used up, they would ship us another box of motherboards, no questions asked. 🤣
Oh, and these clamshell cases were notorious for cutting their own cables if you didn't make sure they were all tucked away inside.
Unwanted? I would absolutely love to have those computers! They have nostalgic memories with me.
I had one of these, I don't have any nostalgia for it.
I remember wanting to upgrade to an AGP video card, and I opened the case up only to find a spot on the motherboard where the slot WOULD be, but Dell didn't populate it.
I could have added a PCI card, but I didn't want to spend $250 on an "old tech" card.
In my country there was a nationally sold brand called "Osborne" (nothing to do with the Osborne 1 computer) that was really literally ubiquitous in government and schools etc. The machines were really dull looking white or dark gray boxes with the most basic components to get your daily work done, just adequate enough specs I would say it. They sold of course them in different price ranges but knowing public sector, I never saw any of the high end models around. In my first IT job, one of the Osborne models we had in a healthcare facility had an issue where the internal speaker's magnet would cause interference with other components on the motherboard resulting in unexpected resets. So as part of our job, whenever we were called to an unit to do a support task like installing a new program, we would routinely also remove the internal speaker from the computer. I would say Osbornes would be my choice for a boring computer.
I worked at a place where we would refurbish or recycle old computers. Units that looked like this were the most common donations. They were innumerable despite being 10-15 years old.
One of my first jobs was IT Administrator for a K-8 school and we had fleets of these things. Not only did the caps fail on the PCs, but they failed on the LCD monitors as well. I saved the school a lot of money by recapping each device that failed...but recapping those motherboards was a huge PIA. Still felt nice to make use of my soldering skills.
Recapping is like the end game of my hobby, it feels so out of reach and insurmountable to me. Do you have any advice on starting out with soldering? I've replaced a couple clock batteries successfully, jittery hands be damned lol.
@@winlover37get a "broken" motherboard that you don't care about and practice on that!
@@Phaleux What do you know I just so happen to have one, thank you!
Also IT admin huh? I got an associate's in IT but haven't made my way into the field yet. Help desk doesn't sound fun so I haven't bothered. You think I'm being dumb not pursuing IT while being passionate about this stuff?
@@winlover37 Go into tech management
@@winlover37I’ve been helpdesk support, system admin, network admin, IT Manager, and most recently IT Specialist (a catch-all title). My advice… figure out your passion in IT and look for something that fills it. I hated the helpdesk and vowed I’d never sit on a phone again… but also hated the management BS of being in charge of a manufacturer’s IT department. Your IT associate degree is a key that’ll open a lot of doors, but you’ll need experience to round things out. I had experience with pro audio/video and CCTV installation & management.. so now I work managing digital evidence (squad/body cam/surv videos) for trials and love it!
A fleet pickup truck is the perfect way to describe boring, basic, no-nonsense, bare-bones anything. Well done!
I'd still rather have a 2004 Ford Ranger fleet pickup truck than one of these Dells. ;-)
@@LabCat me too!
it makes me sad that you can't buy new but no-nonsense trucks in the US anymore. all the trucks turned into bloated Freedom Machines with somehow less hauling capacity.
I absolutely adore these restoration and upgrade videos of old PCs; they're my absolute favorites. I'm hopeful that you can continue working on this PC, fixing the capacitors, implementing some upgrades... The idea of taking an inexpensive and outdated PC that's nothing special, restoring it, enhancing its performance, and utilizing it for retro gaming truly captivates me. However, I'd suggest allocating more time to the gaming test segment in the videos. I wouldn't mind if the video extended to 1 or 2 hours or if it was split into 2 or 3 parts.
I remember using these in the brand new computer lab at my local community college in 2004. Man, how the time flies!
When i worked as a tech support agent for Dell back in 2003-2004, those babies were our battlestations. I would take one of those home in a heartbeat.
We had one of those, it ran XP and was slow as all hell, taking almost 5 minutes to open a browser, but it was the PC I originally played Minecraft and Roblox on for quite a while. We still have it, it's currently sitting in storage. I'd love to bring it back out one day and see if I can get it running better than it used to 😊
Could you play at 60 frames per week?
@@DonVigaDeFierro Lmao, if I was lucky
give it a gpu it deserves it
Out of the box, slow as ****
Make it a sleeper build. Gut it, and put modern parts in it. I have a Dell Vostro from 2012 I got from Work that I installed with an AMD RX 6400, i5 12400f, and 32gb of RAM. Have it hooked up to a Dell E770s CRT. Plays Doom eternal at 1280x1024 at 85fps. But it's a very unassuming setup for sure! 😎
We still have two of these in active use at work! I work in a cognitive psych lab at a university, these old Optiplexes are used as host machines for some old PCI-based eye tracking hardware (SR Research Eyelink II). The software to operate the eye trackers runs on a special DOS variant provided by the manufacturer ("ROMDOS", I think?) for real-time performance, but they also dual-boot XP for maintenance and file access. Fun to see them show up here!
Oh man, that thing was like my childhood! They had these things all over my schools from about age 13, 2004, on up to when I graduated. Funny, because these schools were on two different coasts... I did so much crap on these things, since my schools were both residential blind schools in my home state, then the state my family moved to, which I stayed at during the week and came home on the weekends until I was 16, we moved closer,, and I became a day student.
I remember being about 13 and installing BonzyBuddy, which you covered in another video, on a dorm computer... Man, in hindsight the school PCs should have never let that on, LOL!
I also remember spending a lot of time on stuff like NeoPets and Quizilla ... and opening up the little smily flap to access the ports, I recall. Thanks for the flashback, Clint!
Which blind school?
WSSB and VSDB.
If you remember the late 90's with Dell's Stoner ads touting, "Dude, it's a Dell" which took on a whole new meaning by the mid-00's and has been dogging them ever since.
i love that he puts the dirt back where he found it as if it was part of the whole vintage appel
you never know if that dust bunny is keeping the whole system running
I loved that part too, it made me laugh
I took a Dell Optiplex P4 1.4GHz machine, added flash storage, a 12X DVD drive, Audigy2 and Voodoo 4 4500 AGP card. All in all, it's a pretty great baseline for a retro Windows 98 machine. It's also a fun PC to swap out video and audio options. I sometimes put in a Creative Riva TNT2 and a Diamond Aureal Vortex2 to gauge the different user experiences. These PCs are cheap and widely available. Uninteresting at stock, they can take more interesting components just fine, although you have a few restrictions to navigate with the AGP voltages on some earlier models.
I was super stoked to get one of these back in like 2002! I just put it out on the curb during the pandemic.
My grandparents had this rig (or something super similar) for YEARS! Only ever got rid of it when my grandfather passed away and my grandmother had to move out. I have clear memories of early UA-cam, MSPaint and other humble Windows XP era shenanigans. Don't think the OS was ever updated, even if the (equally boring) DELL VGA monitor was "upgraded" to a 1080p LCD. This was a trip to watch, even if the rig itself is nothing special; it was special to me at the very least.
This is the kind of thing I picture when anyone mentions PC, everyone else pictures cases with a window, RGB lights, liquid nitrogen cooling, multiple GPUs and lots of other bollocks you don't really need. Sometimes simple really is all you need. I still use a PC case I've had since 2006, nothing fancy, of course it now has modern parts in it, but they fit, and that's al that matters to me.
And that's why these PCs are unloved and unwanted lel. It's so boring.
My life is already boring enough. At least let my PC be somewhat fancy lmao.
Same honestly
Because who needs airflow, of course.
I kind of appreciate utilitarian design. For a mid 2000s office PC there is nothing wrong with the design IMO. I don't find them any more boring than the equivalent HP desktops, for example.
Same, RGB lights tire my eyes out as mine are pretty sensitive to light anyway
Blurring out when you put the new thermal paste on was excellent.
That was the shortest car heist in GTA I ever saw XD
Great Video all in all. We had some kind of such a Dell Modell at home and for the time it wasn't too bad. I think it had a dedicated GPU though (Geforce 3 or something like that). It lasted for years and we sold it to an elderly guy, who upgraded the memory and used it for another set of years. Not sure if it's still alive.
Oh man, so many memories of replacing those machine by the truckload (literally!) on a US Army installation in the mid to late 00s. In addition to the capacitor plague those machines were painfully slow with the Army customized version of Win XP.
Even so, they did provide a decent amount of job security due to their issues. At least until Dell themselves bought Perot Systems, who I was working for, and then decided to torpedo all their government contracts in the early 2010s while trying to force a way to make fixed cost contracts more profitable. Needless to say it was not at all a surprise to see Dell sell off Perot Systems for 800 million dollars less than they purchased it for a couple of years prior!
I was about to comment these boring machines take me back to my mid 2000's Army days, especially when I worked as the Company Training NCO.
Government machines clogged with bloatware seems to be one of those constants up there with death and taxes
I am incredibly nostalgic for this era of dells. Not only are were everywhere, but I basically learned about the internet and how to take computers apart on these.
Schools had used them basically all the way up until around 2009-ish when they were all replaced with the HP elitedesk series, my grandparents had an optiplex or a dimension that looked like this that they used all the way until 2013 and it still was reliably chugging along. I specifically remember going on coolamathgames to play BTD3, playing so many unlicensed flash games and reading GameFAQ forums on Dreamcast games back when that was their main computer.
And those were the first computers I ever took apart. My computer repair class in high school had us take these old optiplexes and dimensions apart, pit them back together, and then install Debian Linux on them. They’re certainly boring, but they hold a special place in my heart.
Oh my gods this was literally my first family PC, it was one of these things alongside Dial-Up. I don't remember exactly when we got it, it was a gift from my grandma, but I had so many memories of just browsing the internet, using MSN Messenger and drawing art on that thing.
Sadly it got replaced by a PC with Windows Vista but that Dell Optiplex is literally what helped me get my foot into the internet.
Optiplex shells have been a staple of cheap pc building for…forever now:) I remember the days when I could buy a new gpu, build a full pc with an optiplex cpu/board, some cheap storage, my old gpu, and make enough money to upgrade my ram or storage…then do it again:) I had a lot of fun, never really made money or had top of the line components but it was awesome none the less
These machines are nostalgic for a lot of millennials who went to school in the 00s, though I'm sure the capacitor issues caused financial troubles for thousands of schools across the globe.
Dell covered all of the caps related repairs. It was really quite cool of them to do.
Chevy Cavalier and Pontiac Sunfires were also nostalgic, but there's no way I would own one then, let alone today. Same goes for this heap, no amount of rose tintedness would see me take one out of my company's ewaste pile to take home.
When I was sub contracted as the Head IT for the county back in the 90s-00s. Against my advice they were stupid enough to buy 1000's of these machines At one time in my shop had over 300 of them in repair as they needed the motherboard replaced. The Pentium 4 GX series almost made dell go Bankrupt as they were 98% real POS. Especially with XP on them. They fared a lot better with Me and 2000.
One’s waste is another’s retro treasure!
Dell's RRoD...
I think of these as "dentist computers". The dentist pulled up my X-rays on some kind of Dell OptiPlex, usually between five and ten years old, for some time.
Lol I gave a bunch of these to my brother when he opened up his dental office
Where they probably did good service, taking code entries from the desk personnel to bill insurance, storing patient records including X-rays, and that. Till their caps blew anyway.
I think a lot of Conter strike servers and what not was run on one of them in someone basement (after the user updated there PC from Dads office PC to a dedicated gaming PC still a Dell "office" environment PC but it had okay graphic cards and what not.
sure there was no max setting no 1280x960ish at 50+FPS nope it was 1024x768 (4:3) medium at 30ish FPS.
My first job out of college was working for a school district in the mid-to-late 2000s. The compact version you show briefly, with almost these exact same specs, was my work computer for nearly my entire time there.
What made it even more amusing was that our accounting system was run on an ancient HP 3000 server at the County Office of Ed (so old that, even 20 years ago, they had to resort to eBay to get spare parts for it because HP had sunset support). I had to run a terminal emulator to connect to it every time I needed to run a budget report or move money around.
I was a Dell contractor in 2007 that replaced around 4000 motherboards in GX270 machines under their extended warranty thing because of lawsuits. I did it again in 2008 for an additional 500 or so machines. Funny that they only covered the motherboards and not the power supplies, which had the same problem. Their LCD monitors also had the same problem.
The replacement motherboards used the EXACT SAME CAPACITORS, and they failed exactly in the same manner in the same timeframe as the originals. But it was long enough to get them out of their service contracts and warranty periods so they could wash their hands of the matter. By 2007-2008, these machines were ancient history, the only places that still had them were large corporations and K-12.
They never made it to the second hand market in numbers, most of them went to the landfill, or shipped off to third world countries in bulk for scrap.
I still occasionally find these things, usually in garage/estate sales where they had been stuffed away and forgotten about for decades. I last saw one about a year ago in the local junk yard and it predictably had all failed caps. They wanted $20 for it, but it would cost three times that to recap the machine.
In 2005 I worked for the MetroPCS corporate owned service center office in Naples Florida. And this was the exact computer we all used. Our work program was still dos-based without any graphics just green letters and numbers, luckily we were able to surf the web on our downtime. We must have had like 20 of them. Definitely brings back memories
You just brought back some serious 2K office vibes for me. Optiplex machines certainly had their place; driving finance, insurance, spreadsheet heads -- heck, probably even drove the DMV (pun intended).
By the time i retired mine, the only original parts left were the case, mobo, and processor. I sawed out the back panel to fit a standard PSU.
Moved to a new school where I got to assist in the unboxing and distribution of a couple dozen of these machines. Not even a year later I was rounding them back up to bring them back to a classroom with a tower of cardboard boxes fresh arrived with replacement boards, each and every one. Highschooler’s dream, just hang out, swap memory and processors, reapply thermal paste, the fact that the boards came on one thumb-screw secured tray was a breeze. Afterwards wrapped up the day with some Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, ran it better on that integrated graphics than than my Radeon 9200 could.
Funny thing is my high school back in 2004 used these almost exclusively. They were the bane of everybody in the design and programming classes. More than a couple crapped out because they couldn't handle some of the software running for long periods or screwy infinite loops
Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the fact the school used these. After all they also had a head of the IT department that gave everyone the admin account password adn who caused a 2 week delay in opening the school (literally as it was brand new) because the ISO image for windows xp he was using for every computer in the building had been made at his house....on a pc that had a virus on it, which ended up on the ISO and kept crashing every pc every time they tried to get the OS installed, so nothing in the building could operate properly and they couldn't open the school as a result
Gets better - a few years later I went to college, went into IT as a programmer and surprise surprise, said head of IT was now teaching several of my hardware and programming classes. and people say the dilbert principle isn't real
These are background objects when making a TV show or movie. Kind of like a mail or garbage truck. You know what it is when you see it and that is all it needed to be.
CS Office in CS Source is what comes to mind
That last shot could have had a smoke machine on the background of the computer, just for fun 😂
Always great, making a good and interesting video on a random PC from the '00!
I was the admin for a bunch of Dell Poweredge 400SC systems back in the day, which were basically your system rebadged with a server faceplate. I remember those cases being a royal pain to work on. Dell was dumping these servers on the market with 2Ghz Celerons, 128Mb Ram, and a 40GB IDE HD for $399. If you didn’t hate your job by then, working on those slow POS in their original configuration would make you pretty quick.
I loved my GX270, I got it from a surplus store in late 2017, upgraded the hell out of it, and ran XP. It was supposed to just be a retro rig, but I genuinely enjoyed using it as one of my main computers. It had a Soundblaster Live!, a nice AGP card, 2.5 GB of RAM, a solid 3 GHz P4, the works. It finally died late last year, the temp sensor would show it was overheating, even if it was ice cold, with multiple different CPUs. Tried a recap, and while it wasn't worse, I was stuck in the same boat. I recently jumped ship to a Dimension 8300, an almost identical machine.
the dimensions look a lot nicer, preferable to boring gaming computers we have now
You can just run a VM for old software
The temp sensor it's referring to could actually be the airflow temp sensor in the fan. If you look at the fan and see a little blue thing sticking out of the fan hub, that's a temperature sensor and it could be bad. Replacing the fan might fix it.
I’m in it for the hardware, man. VMs are convenient for those who don’t like to tinker, though.
@@davidpayneii289 yes I don't want a lot of stuff aroind generally. No old machines for me
Hey, at least that one had an AGP slot, I remember ones from that generation that were so cheap they didn't have the AGP slot populated, with almost zero upgradability they were slow when new, and frustrating when customers would attempt to make them usable
Indeed, my aunt happened to buy one of these used that had only PCI slots & a socket 775 celeron D.
But somehow sata hard drive, dvd drive & DDR2 ram support.
Such a weird combination of newer tech & cost savings.
Also weirdly logical for school computer were everything is guided to teach how to do Word and Excel in limited class time
My father had this exact computer in his office at work. Eventually he got a better one from the employer, so we brought the old one home and used it as a home computer for a while. I also remember seeing a few in my college, although most of the student PCs were HP Vectras.
This my friend's PC. He kept asking me to help make it faster, so I did everything under the sun to it. Defrag, more RAM, video card because teenage me thought XP offloaded window rendering to the GPU like Vista did, an SSD+HDD upgrade (remember those hybrid drives?), constant cleaning because it overheated due to dust from sitting under a desk. Good times. I eventually gave him a decent hand me down, but that Optiplex was run through the ringer.
In my senior year of high school, in my computer engineering class, our task was to completely take apart a computer and put it back together. The Optiplexes were the ones we were supposed to use. I was the only one who couldn't the computer to power back on after reassembling it, and its haunted me ever since. Keep in mind I knew about what I was doing, I just sucked shit at it lol
We had these at school. It had a removeable drivebay for our own hard disks (it was an IT education). Memories! CT en UT at school :)
Whenever you uploaded the video of this model I was geniunely surprised and excited about you reviewing this computer. I had this PC since 2011 for my sister who was at the time 10 years old, it wasn't used really much because of how slow it was. In 2019, I upgraded the RAM and the graphics card, and the fact that I could browse the Internet and even get to check social media with Windows 7 installed, is crazy, considering how old this machine is and the OS that it was intended to run. Also I wouldn't have ever known the risk I had of having that machine on. It's crazy to know now that this particular model didn't really lasted long, and it was dangerous to use. Mine is still on my room and it works!
Thanks for the video! I've used machines like this in the office, and I never found them exciting. However, I was amused by your description of it being boring, ugly, and causing your eyes to glaze over. I grew up in the 80's and 90's, so just a few years older than you, and the two decades solid of ALL MS-DOS / Windows PC's being angular, beige boxes has made THAT the definition of "boring, ugly, and cause my eyes to glaze over." 🙂 I still have my AT clone and Gateway 2000 PC (which is beige but has a little swoop of a design on the front) from 1989 and 1994, and I'm only just now warming up to them looking "kinda nice" rather than "boring, ugly-ass beige boxes." When Dell started making their bog-standard computers black with silver highlights, while I never owned one of them, I was very pleased to see that SOMEONE was finally doing something different with their computer cases, to provide our eyes with some relief from the sea of boring, ugly, beige boxes.
As with all things aesthetic, it's all in the eye of the beholder! 🙂
Seeing my old Packard Bell pc in the photos people submitted in the conversation was a wonderful bit of nostalgia for me.
same, i had the second one he showed!
That was the one we had for the family computer
Yup, that was our family pc in 1995. Still remember the funky home living room gui it came with.
This was my first computer; my dad worked at Dell and could get it pretty easily. And to me at the time it was the coolest thing ever because it was a computer and it was MINE. I didn't understand specs or anything, but I could go on the internet and play Quake 2, Diablo 2, StarCraft, and Morrowind. Still nostalgic for the look of that tower (in fact, I think my old one is still collecting dustvat my parents' house)
Literally the day you posted this I brought home a Dell Dimension 4600 with pretty much the same specs plus an nvidia GeForce4 MX440. I've been volunteering at my local historical society (no, the Dell was not an exhibit) and they were just getting rid of some old computer equipment and when I raised my eyebrows they offered it to me. I was really just excited to get my hands on that nice Dell 4:3 lcd monitor for another project, I wasn't expecting to bring home an actually decent and running XP machine.
The other project doesn't want to play nice with the monitor, AND the package included the original Dell keyboard with it's internet shortcut buttons and multimedia controls so... dude, I guess I got a Dell! The biggest difference between your OptiPlex and my Dimension aside from the graphics card is the case. They look very similar by my side panel just comes off like normal instead of the whole rig unfolding like a Saw trap. I think I'm a little jealous.
edit to add... I did check and all my caps seem in good shape. Also, none of the last three owners bothered to wipe anything, so in addition to history museum accessioning records I also have papers and photos belonging to a University of Delaware art conservation professor AND some teenage girl's 2006 Las Vegas vacation photos. So now I'm somehow responsible for all that stuff.
was waiting for review my favorite pc from 2000-2005 for a long time